No, not really, it is more of a status mark than anything else. High-ranking Chinese Communist party members (because most of the kids who end up in the US universities will be from rich families, and in China the rich families are connected to a certain political party) have, as all Communist Party leaders everywhere, a penchant for all things Western, especially American.
If you make a list of all the kids of ex-communist leaders from the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (especially the parts of Eastern Europe where the influence of the Communist parties is still strong, whatever their current name is), and you'll see it is a definite trend.
You mean you don't? You people amaze me. What's next? Giving vaccines and antibiotics to your children and having them brush their teeth with FLUORINE?
You're absolutely right to be concerned, bro. We have on of these mobile phone radiation emitters attached to the pole with the traffic light on the exit of town,and every time I stop to wait for the traffic light, the coffee in the cup holder in my car warms up. I can't stop wondering what this all is about while it is red. But when it goes green, I feel so happy and content that I forget to look it up.
Authentication management is just as much part of information security as is access control and monitoring. Not sure why would you need to separate them out either way. In general, you're right there are technical means to impose any kind of monitoring and control, and an asinine system can mitigate the potential of unwarranted data access. However, such system is not trivial and, as you say, requires considerable cost to implement, more so if the company wants to operate as efficiently with such as system as without.
However, such a system would have rendered the "best practice" that the OP proposes even more worthless, if that was at all possible in the first place.
Why did Bob need to access and download a.csv file with 100,000 customers data?
By that time, of course, it is too late to do much, as Bob already has the data. Unless, of course, you work for a major bank, the Firm or the CIA, and you can afford to have Bob legally kidnapped.
This is why it is always a better solution to consider what will make a smart employee a disgruntled one, and remove that reason, rather than to put unreasonable brakes on what people can or cannot do at the company.
Personally, I think he is a true hero.
Personally, I think that while his motives were noble, it is not unlikely that he was just used by his superiors along with Assange. However, this doesn't really matter in the discussion of what is bollocks security best practice and what isn't.
This is not a "best practice", as it is completely worthless.
There is a best practice on the opposite side that is capable to defeat your "best practice" on any day of the week and twice during the weekend, and all smart employees have figured it out long ago. It is for the employee to collect the data while they have access, and do not depend on the benevolence of the company policies after the termination decision.
Just so I am not entirely abstract, this is exactly what a certain Bradley Manning allegedly did while in employment of a certain large military organization.
Before the Matrix takes over, we'll have a brief but interesting age looking somewhat like the Plague of the Pythons, as each country fits their own brain control implant.
Well, I am neither a conservative nor an American, nor have I ever said or implied that GW deserved a Nobel Prize. I don't follow us talk radio either, and I only have two neocon authors in my library, both of them university professors. And I still think that your criteria as to who deserves a peace prize are a tad low.
Good job fighting the strawman you put up in my place though.
Yours is a knee-jerk reaction to a sound and factual criticism. The "Peace Nobel" is a worthless PR exercise which only lowers the value of the original prizes. The "few others" make a pretty large group on the list, and the rest of the "right" people with the "important causes" have, at least since WWII, been mostly connected to whatever political fad was current the West at the time of the award.
As richer mines are exhausted, developers turn their attention to poorer sources of the element and eventually develop cheap methods of extracting it, rising "known reserves".
Beyond new mining techniques, we can also substitute materials for copper.
Your first quote from Wikipedia basically repeats what I'm saying, that is that demand is increasing rapidly, that recycling is not an option that can satisfy it, and that reserves are finite, known and also insufficient to satisfy the demand.
The part about the extractable copper being finite was, of course, true in 1900 as well, the difference between 1900 and now is that we have already nearly reached the level of ore depletion beyond which metal cannot be extracted easily, not only with current technology but with any technology, as the required energy is too much. And no, PV isn't going to make it possible either, nor will Mr. Fusion -- simply dissipating that kind of energy will mean a much warmer Earth than even the most pessimistic global warming projections.
Incidentally, PV production will also become a problem as we run out of certain materials for PV construction which happen to be metals too. I have not heard of anything that is PV and is not based on doping a substrate with several esoteric metals, the supply of which is already tight.
As for substitution, there are applications where it is possible, but there are many where it isn't. Power transmission is one, the many industrial uses of copper in various alloys are another. Not to mention the explosive need for copper wire if we move away from fossil fuels to electricity in transportation.
Considering how much the Earth's crust weights
We cannot extract metal which is diffused in the crust, there is simply not enough energy to crush all that rock and separate out the atoms of interest. Maybe we can genetically engineer some mollusks that do that kind of filtering for us some day while they go about with their lives, but unless I see a few of those laboring inside their titanium shell and going back to the factory just before they die, I have to call you out on that. Extraction from "the crust" or from the ocean is simply science fiction.
I probably don't want to live solely on nutritional yeast and spirulina and similar things made into "soylent yellow", but it is probably possible (and probably healthier than the Standard American Diet, not that it takes much to be better than SAD).
The evidence from past biodiversity crises (otherwise known as "extinction events") indicate that you won't be able to collect enough bacteria to produce soylent yellow. Sorry. Maybe soylent green will be an option for a while, and hopefully you'll be the consumer and not the fodder.
To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world.
The prayer of the village shaman for rain to clean the village from excrement may create a possibility of changing the world and bringing the desired effect, but setting up a well-maintained toilet, while boring and mundane, works better on any day of the week, at least in my village.
The "Peace Nobel" is such a joke that it does not deserve any consideration. It has been awarded to terrorists, to heads of states that use terror as a matter of course and to organizations that ought to be protecting the peace, but fail or promote less honorable agendas.
It turned into a particularly sad joke after it was awarded in advance of any actual achievement.
There is no Nobel Prize in Economics, there is a similarly named award that is presented alongside the real Nobel Prizes. Also, there should not be one, as economics hardly qualifies as a science, and there is already a Nobel Prize for literature.
Really, now? Most goods fabricated from metals are capital goods and are in use for many years. Buildings are in use for longer than that, those that use metals anyway. Besides, you have not really looked at demand and availability, haven't you? Just looking at annual production rates will show that we need more than we'll ever be able to recycle, even if we recycle 100%, which is, of course, ridiculous proposition. At the least we'll need to keep the furnaces, no?
We're running out of reserves of at least the following: gold, silver and platinum-group metals, zinc, tin, indium, zirconium, cadmium, tungsten, copper, manganese, nickel and molybdenum. There are metals like gallium, germanium and scandium that are not produced separately, but as part of the extraction process for other metals. Once the extraction process stops, they become unavailable, because it is not efficient to produce them separately. And when I say "efficient", I mean "energy efficient", not "economically efficient". We'll need more energy than we have available to mine or recycle those. This isn't news, either.
So, while you can dream about "technologies of abundance", the sad truth is that nothing magical is available to humanity at present, and that only careful resource allocation will help us cross the threshold from the wanton and reckless growth of the past 100 years into a sustainable model that can carry us forward in the medium, long and very long run. The alternative is a collapse of the civilization.
Unfortunately, a careful resource allocation won't happen in a market economy, which tends to heavily discount events that are two generations away, so we'll likely see a serious economic collapse and probably a major war or three within our times. Incidentally, the US policies in the Middle East in the past 20 years have nicely set up the stage for one of those.
But in (wrongly) contesting a minor point, you've drifted too far away from the topic of the article, which is the destruction of the biosphere and what it means for the human civilization, and in what little attention you try to give to the topic, you misunderstand it completely.
When I say we have no technological fixes to the biodiversity problem, I mean (as I said repeatedly) that we simply cannot restore fast enough what we destroy. There is a lot of information about the extinction rates human development has brought about, and I am sure you can google, bing or duckduckgo it, but here is one reference: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/extinction/massext/statement_03.html . The situation with the biosphere is not immoral, it is beyond hope.
As I said already, every time such a rate of species extinctions in an ecosystem had come about, the ecosystem had collapsed, and when it did it took something on the order of 10-15 million years for it to recover, during which time, as you aptly noted, most of the life forms that survived were bacteria. What "technologies of abundance" does the humanity have at present or available within a few decades to counter this? Nothing, even assuming that our research infrastructure and institutions will continue to work in the face of a looming crisis intact, which they won't. This will be the end of our civilization, unless we recast ourselves as Terminators, for which, regretfully, we don't have enough titanium.
Would better shovels be a "technological fix" to this? Your irony is totally out of place, but without it this is a good question that merits a serious answer. The answer is, unfortunately, hardly. Even if you learn to replant faster, you will not be recreating a biosphere with a balanced ecology, and the shovels won't replace the gone species. There is no tech that can do that, nor there is one on the horizon.
The trees won't grow faster, and evolution in the new forests will not work faster, so Mother Nature will not be able to compe
I recommend to you to peruse the "Limits to Growth" model, published in 1973 or 1974 and compare its prediction to the state of the world today. There are a few follow-up reports that are released, and this kind of news never makes slashdot.
I am not optimistic of new tech either. In the past 20 years we have not seen much of a breakthrough in technology. The biggest success stories of the 21 century are an advertisement company and a re-seller of chinese pocket calculators.
No, looking at the things as they really are, it seems that the age of unlimited growth is over, and that we'll hit the wall at high speed.
Nice talk. Now, let's put some realism into it and see where we get.
First, I'm not very impressed by your "I'm Gaia" thoughts. The Earth does not, indeed, care about what walks its crust, and in the course of untold millenia anything may happen. But these are all things that don't concern me. What concerns me is my immediate future, the future of my children and that of their grandchildren.
Because I subscribe to this rather narrow view of the world, I'd rather have the biosphere I grew up in continue to thrive and evolve naturally, and not collapse because of the abuse we've unleashed on it, especially since the onset of the Industrial age and double especially since the second world war. It is cool if you don't care about it, or believe that a few thousand years of strife won't matter, but in this case your opinion just does not matter to me. I'm not interested in fantasy or alternative history, but in problems we have right here and now.
Second, I care about your "I'm Gaia" view even less when I consider the motives behind it. We are destroying the environment for only one reason -- because we don't want to reign in our greed and bear the costs of our development ourselves, although we can see the consequences pretty well. You can choose not to face the fact that human greed, especially modern-world greed excused by the capitalist ideology, is the reason for the environmental collapse we're causing. You can also imagine all kinds of evolution scenarios in search for more excuses to our behaviour. However, your view of the world is then both wrong and immoral and does not merit much serious consideration.
Third, sadly, almost nothing of the things you write about is on the table, neither for us today, nor for the next two generations.
We have no usable cold fusion, we have no usable hot fusion, we have no ubiquitous, accessible, cheap and safe fission energy, we have no technology that can put more than a score of people in low Earth orbit without enormous cost and damage to the environment and we don't have technologies to build a self-supporting settlement away from Earth. We have no solar power tech that can deploy in space and provide cheap energy to the Earth, and the one we use on Earth is manufactured cheaply only in places where the environment is the victim. We have not seriously tried to develop some of those, but it is unlikely that we'll see success in the short to medium run even if we agree to significant sacrifices, which I don't see happening.
Fourth, the loss of biodiversity is not only due to the depleting fish stock -- we're destroying species most effectively by destroying their habitats. Estimates are that the current species extinction rate (and that includes bacteria, btw) is much, much higher than the "normal" rate that prevailed before the onset of the industrial age and is comparable to an extinction event. Each time such species extinction rates have been detected in the past, they were followed by a near-destruction of the environment and a period of 10 to 15 million years until biodiversity recovered. It is extremely unlikely that our descendants will survive such an episode, and it is a certainty that our civilization will be wiped out by it completely.
Regretfully, NOTHING we have today and on the radar screen in terms of biotech can compensate for this wanton destruction. We're as far from "Jurassic park" today as we were 30 years ago, when the movie was first screened, and the Jurassic park tech is less than we need to counter the avalanche of extinctions we've triggered.
We do, apparently, have "digital worlds", but from what I've seen from the Civ games, the Second Life, the Mindcraft worlds and the shoot-em-up games on the kids' consoles, they are not an option. At any rate, no matter how much you distract the brain, eventually the stomach will wake you up from your digital diversion.
To sum it up, because you look at the world not from the perspective of humanity today, you are content with fantastic ideas
Pennsylvania used to have rivers that caught fire. Now they are much cleaner...
Exporting pollution isn't a technological "fix". US may be cleaner today, but the most important reason is that polluting production was moved abroad where there are no environmental regulations.
The rivers in China now burn just as bright, it is easier to cut the air in Beijing with a knife on a bad day than to breathe it, and in the wrong season the pollution goes almost as far as California, killing the forests in Northern Japan on the way. Of course, you're not seeing this in the US, so you believe the problem is "fixed". Alas, you're wrong.
Incidentally, this is how you have notebooks for less than $500. Mine is (mostly) made in Japan according to all pesky government environmental standards, and costs upwards of $2000.
Nature can rebound very quickly when given the chance
Wrong on all counts.
First, "Nature can rebound when given the chance" is not a technological fix.
Second, nature can only rebound from a limited damage, not any damage. If you have read the article, you'd know the assumption that we've not yet inflicted the kind of damage nature can't handle is at least highly suspect.
Worse, "Nature can rebound" is the same attitude that caused the burning rivers in Pennsylvania in the first place, that is, shifting the cost of your pollution into someone else's backyard, preferably the backyard of someone who can't get back at you.
There are also limits to how much, and how quick is "very quick". Even if you reforest the 1000 year old forest you cut down for a decade, it will take at least another 1000 years for it to achieve the diversity you've had in the first place. Maybe. So, your reforestation example is also very much short of a technology that can "fix" deforestation at the pace and cost it was caused in the first place.
Overall, plants grow better with more CO2.
Wrong. Plants grow better with more CO2 only compared to the "normal" conditions that we are experiencing now. Once conditions change, the plants may or may not grow, depending on how the effects are distributed. If history is any indication, any major shift in global temperatures has caused extinction events massive enough to be noticed millions of years later.
However, global warming will turn Canada and Siberia into much more diverse biological areas eventually
"Eventually" in this case is likely measured in millenia or more. In the long run there is probably a "fix" for everything, but int he long run we're all dead. The assumption of the OP is that there is always a "fix" that is available when we needed. You have miserably failed to demonstrate such a fix for any significant problem I've mentioned so far.
For example, how can we run out of metals on the Earth? Where do you think metals go after they are used? Why can't we just recycle them?
I assume they go into the finished products, and unless you want to unravel your existing infrastructure, you'd need more. Also, it seems that recycling isn't that easy, as we're still mining instead of recycling. You may claim there is a technology, which is just "expensive", but this is the same as having no viable technology. We know of fusion, but cannot use it for power generation.
you are contributing to a climate of negativism that could become a self-fulfilling prophecy if people start fighting over perceived scarcity rather than create more abundance for all with the same technology
It is exactly the other way around. By praying that "future technological development" will solve anything, you're not addressing the real and significant costs imposed by reckless current consumption. And you're very likely contributing to the undermining of development of future technologies.
This is not an example of deploying technology to solve a problem. We just stopped outputting more CFCs, and we are waiting for the nature to take its course, eventually. As of today, the ozone hole is still there, and we're still waiting. You can watch nature's progress here: http://ozonewatch.gsfc.nasa.gov/
What if it costs more than the GDP by then? What if, in addition, GDP declines very, very much because of the factors, described in the article, putting a solution totally out of reach?
Of course, there is the obvious question too -- why wait until a problem requires most of the GDP, instead of using the amazing predictive powers of science, see the problem before it occurs and mitigate it at a much smaller fraction of the GDP?
how far we've come on commercial space flight in only about a decade.
How far exactly? Russia is still dominating commercial space flight and have the cheapest and most capable launch platform. Incidentally, it is over 50 years old. The new developments in the US are mostly NASA-licensed tech cobbled together in a smaller package by staff plucked from NASA. That is, we're still talking Herr Wernher, more or less.
Besides, LEO commercial launches are largely irrelevant to the problems we need to solve, outside of the improved ability to monitor the destruction of the environment or a better GPS, in addition to being probably a serious environmental hazard.
Incidentally, you sidestepped my question. Show me at least one case when a technology was deployed to "fix" a global environmental issue, and "fixed" it successfully. Wait, I'll make it even easier for you, forget "fixing", show me a PROPOSAL to "fix" a global environmental problem, a proposal that is based on existing, commercial technology and has reasonable expectations to succeed.
twitter is not a solution to the problems I describe. IT can optimize the logistics of digging up a resource, but it won't produce more chromium ore once we use up the stock.
Just because a Linux distro might be heavily customized by a subcontractor of Raytheon does not make it, or the networks of Raytheon or the subcontractor, impenetrable to Chinese (or other) hackers.
Slashdot Mirror
No, not really, it is more of a status mark than anything else. High-ranking Chinese Communist party members (because most of the kids who end up in the US universities will be from rich families, and in China the rich families are connected to a certain political party) have, as all Communist Party leaders everywhere, a penchant for all things Western, especially American.
If you make a list of all the kids of ex-communist leaders from the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (especially the parts of Eastern Europe where the influence of the Communist parties is still strong, whatever their current name is), and you'll see it is a definite trend.
It isn't about education, it is about image.
Googlerolla. The steamrolla that crushes everything.
You mean you don't? You people amaze me. What's next? Giving vaccines and antibiotics to your children and having them brush their teeth with FLUORINE?
You're absolutely right to be concerned, bro. We have on of these mobile phone radiation emitters attached to the pole with the traffic light on the exit of town,and every time I stop to wait for the traffic light, the coffee in the cup holder in my car warms up. I can't stop wondering what this all is about while it is red. But when it goes green, I feel so happy and content that I forget to look it up.
Until the next morning.
and not have to recharge it more then once a day.
That was back then when I had a Dell Axim with an extra battery. These days I only want to recharge it once a week, if that.
That is what information security handles
Authentication management is just as much part of information security as is access control and monitoring. Not sure why would you need to separate them out either way. In general, you're right there are technical means to impose any kind of monitoring and control, and an asinine system can mitigate the potential of unwarranted data access. However, such system is not trivial and, as you say, requires considerable cost to implement, more so if the company wants to operate as efficiently with such as system as without.
However, such a system would have rendered the "best practice" that the OP proposes even more worthless, if that was at all possible in the first place.
Why did Bob need to access and download a .csv file with 100,000 customers data?
By that time, of course, it is too late to do much, as Bob already has the data. Unless, of course, you work for a major bank, the Firm or the CIA, and you can afford to have Bob legally kidnapped.
This is why it is always a better solution to consider what will make a smart employee a disgruntled one, and remove that reason, rather than to put unreasonable brakes on what people can or cannot do at the company.
Personally, I think he is a true hero.
Personally, I think that while his motives were noble, it is not unlikely that he was just used by his superiors along with Assange. However, this doesn't really matter in the discussion of what is bollocks security best practice and what isn't.
This is not a "best practice", as it is completely worthless.
There is a best practice on the opposite side that is capable to defeat your "best practice" on any day of the week and twice during the weekend, and all smart employees have figured it out long ago. It is for the employee to collect the data while they have access, and do not depend on the benevolence of the company policies after the termination decision.
Just so I am not entirely abstract, this is exactly what a certain Bradley Manning allegedly did while in employment of a certain large military organization.
Before the Matrix takes over, we'll have a brief but interesting age looking somewhat like the Plague of the Pythons, as each country fits their own brain control implant.
Well, I am neither a conservative nor an American, nor have I ever said or implied that GW deserved a Nobel Prize. I don't follow us talk radio either, and I only have two neocon authors in my library, both of them university professors. And I still think that your criteria as to who deserves a peace prize are a tad low. Good job fighting the strawman you put up in my place though.
Yours is a knee-jerk reaction to a sound and factual criticism. The "Peace Nobel" is a worthless PR exercise which only lowers the value of the original prizes. The "few others" make a pretty large group on the list, and the rest of the "right" people with the "important causes" have, at least since WWII, been mostly connected to whatever political fad was current the West at the time of the award.
As richer mines are exhausted, developers turn their attention to poorer sources of the element and eventually develop cheap methods of extracting it, rising "known reserves".
Beyond new mining techniques, we can also substitute materials for copper.
Your first quote from Wikipedia basically repeats what I'm saying, that is that demand is increasing rapidly, that recycling is not an option that can satisfy it, and that reserves are finite, known and also insufficient to satisfy the demand.
The part about the extractable copper being finite was, of course, true in 1900 as well, the difference between 1900 and now is that we have already nearly reached the level of ore depletion beyond which metal cannot be extracted easily, not only with current technology but with any technology, as the required energy is too much. And no, PV isn't going to make it possible either, nor will Mr. Fusion -- simply dissipating that kind of energy will mean a much warmer Earth than even the most pessimistic global warming projections.
Incidentally, PV production will also become a problem as we run out of certain materials for PV construction which happen to be metals too. I have not heard of anything that is PV and is not based on doping a substrate with several esoteric metals, the supply of which is already tight.
As for substitution, there are applications where it is possible, but there are many where it isn't. Power transmission is one, the many industrial uses of copper in various alloys are another. Not to mention the explosive need for copper wire if we move away from fossil fuels to electricity in transportation.
Considering how much the Earth's crust weights
We cannot extract metal which is diffused in the crust, there is simply not enough energy to crush all that rock and separate out the atoms of interest. Maybe we can genetically engineer some mollusks that do that kind of filtering for us some day while they go about with their lives, but unless I see a few of those laboring inside their titanium shell and going back to the factory just before they die, I have to call you out on that. Extraction from "the crust" or from the ocean is simply science fiction.
I probably don't want to live solely on nutritional yeast and spirulina and similar things made into "soylent yellow", but it is probably possible (and probably healthier than the Standard American Diet, not that it takes much to be better than SAD).
The evidence from past biodiversity crises (otherwise known as "extinction events") indicate that you won't be able to collect enough bacteria to produce soylent yellow. Sorry. Maybe soylent green will be an option for a while, and hopefully you'll be the consumer and not the fodder.
To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world.
The prayer of the village shaman for rain to clean the village from excrement may create a possibility of changing the world and bringing the desired effect, but setting up a well-maintained toilet, while boring and mundane, works better on any day of the week, at least in my village.
I've enjoyed our conversation.
Cheers
The "Peace Nobel" is such a joke that it does not deserve any consideration. It has been awarded to terrorists, to heads of states that use terror as a matter of course and to organizations that ought to be protecting the peace, but fail or promote less honorable agendas.
It turned into a particularly sad joke after it was awarded in advance of any actual achievement.
There is no Nobel Prize in Economics, there is a similarly named award that is presented alongside the real Nobel Prizes. Also, there should not be one, as economics hardly qualifies as a science, and there is already a Nobel Prize for literature.
Something like 98%
Really, now? Most goods fabricated from metals are capital goods and are in use for many years. Buildings are in use for longer than that, those that use metals anyway. Besides, you have not really looked at demand and availability, haven't you? Just looking at annual production rates will show that we need more than we'll ever be able to recycle, even if we recycle 100%, which is, of course, ridiculous proposition. At the least we'll need to keep the furnaces, no?
We're running out of reserves of at least the following: gold, silver and platinum-group metals, zinc, tin, indium, zirconium, cadmium, tungsten, copper, manganese, nickel and molybdenum. There are metals like gallium, germanium and scandium that are not produced separately, but as part of the extraction process for other metals. Once the extraction process stops, they become unavailable, because it is not efficient to produce them separately. And when I say "efficient", I mean "energy efficient", not "economically efficient". We'll need more energy than we have available to mine or recycle those. This isn't news, either.
So, while you can dream about "technologies of abundance", the sad truth is that nothing magical is available to humanity at present, and that only careful resource allocation will help us cross the threshold from the wanton and reckless growth of the past 100 years into a sustainable model that can carry us forward in the medium, long and very long run. The alternative is a collapse of the civilization.
Unfortunately, a careful resource allocation won't happen in a market economy, which tends to heavily discount events that are two generations away, so we'll likely see a serious economic collapse and probably a major war or three within our times. Incidentally, the US policies in the Middle East in the past 20 years have nicely set up the stage for one of those.
But in (wrongly) contesting a minor point, you've drifted too far away from the topic of the article, which is the destruction of the biosphere and what it means for the human civilization, and in what little attention you try to give to the topic, you misunderstand it completely.
When I say we have no technological fixes to the biodiversity problem, I mean (as I said repeatedly) that we simply cannot restore fast enough what we destroy. There is a lot of information about the extinction rates human development has brought about, and I am sure you can google, bing or duckduckgo it, but here is one reference: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/extinction/massext/statement_03.html . The situation with the biosphere is not immoral, it is beyond hope.
As I said already, every time such a rate of species extinctions in an ecosystem had come about, the ecosystem had collapsed, and when it did it took something on the order of 10-15 million years for it to recover, during which time, as you aptly noted, most of the life forms that survived were bacteria. What "technologies of abundance" does the humanity have at present or available within a few decades to counter this? Nothing, even assuming that our research infrastructure and institutions will continue to work in the face of a looming crisis intact, which they won't. This will be the end of our civilization, unless we recast ourselves as Terminators, for which, regretfully, we don't have enough titanium.
Would better shovels be a "technological fix" to this? Your irony is totally out of place, but without it this is a good question that merits a serious answer. The answer is, unfortunately, hardly. Even if you learn to replant faster, you will not be recreating a biosphere with a balanced ecology, and the shovels won't replace the gone species. There is no tech that can do that, nor there is one on the horizon.
The trees won't grow faster, and evolution in the new forests will not work faster, so Mother Nature will not be able to compe
I recommend to you to peruse the "Limits to Growth" model, published in 1973 or 1974 and compare its prediction to the state of the world today. There are a few follow-up reports that are released, and this kind of news never makes slashdot.
I am not optimistic of new tech either. In the past 20 years we have not seen much of a breakthrough in technology. The biggest success stories of the 21 century are an advertisement company and a re-seller of chinese pocket calculators.
No, looking at the things as they really are, it seems that the age of unlimited growth is over, and that we'll hit the wall at high speed.
You can always run freenet on your tablet, it will back the important parts for you ;)
Nice talk. Now, let's put some realism into it and see where we get.
First, I'm not very impressed by your "I'm Gaia" thoughts. The Earth does not, indeed, care about what walks its crust, and in the course of untold millenia anything may happen. But these are all things that don't concern me. What concerns me is my immediate future, the future of my children and that of their grandchildren.
Because I subscribe to this rather narrow view of the world, I'd rather have the biosphere I grew up in continue to thrive and evolve naturally, and not collapse because of the abuse we've unleashed on it, especially since the onset of the Industrial age and double especially since the second world war. It is cool if you don't care about it, or believe that a few thousand years of strife won't matter, but in this case your opinion just does not matter to me. I'm not interested in fantasy or alternative history, but in problems we have right here and now.
Second, I care about your "I'm Gaia" view even less when I consider the motives behind it. We are destroying the environment for only one reason -- because we don't want to reign in our greed and bear the costs of our development ourselves, although we can see the consequences pretty well. You can choose not to face the fact that human greed, especially modern-world greed excused by the capitalist ideology, is the reason for the environmental collapse we're causing. You can also imagine all kinds of evolution scenarios in search for more excuses to our behaviour. However, your view of the world is then both wrong and immoral and does not merit much serious consideration.
Third, sadly, almost nothing of the things you write about is on the table, neither for us today, nor for the next two generations.
We have no usable cold fusion, we have no usable hot fusion, we have no ubiquitous, accessible, cheap and safe fission energy, we have no technology that can put more than a score of people in low Earth orbit without enormous cost and damage to the environment and we don't have technologies to build a self-supporting settlement away from Earth. We have no solar power tech that can deploy in space and provide cheap energy to the Earth, and the one we use on Earth is manufactured cheaply only in places where the environment is the victim. We have not seriously tried to develop some of those, but it is unlikely that we'll see success in the short to medium run even if we agree to significant sacrifices, which I don't see happening.
Fourth, the loss of biodiversity is not only due to the depleting fish stock -- we're destroying species most effectively by destroying their habitats. Estimates are that the current species extinction rate (and that includes bacteria, btw) is much, much higher than the "normal" rate that prevailed before the onset of the industrial age and is comparable to an extinction event. Each time such species extinction rates have been detected in the past, they were followed by a near-destruction of the environment and a period of 10 to 15 million years until biodiversity recovered. It is extremely unlikely that our descendants will survive such an episode, and it is a certainty that our civilization will be wiped out by it completely.
Regretfully, NOTHING we have today and on the radar screen in terms of biotech can compensate for this wanton destruction. We're as far from "Jurassic park" today as we were 30 years ago, when the movie was first screened, and the Jurassic park tech is less than we need to counter the avalanche of extinctions we've triggered.
We do, apparently, have "digital worlds", but from what I've seen from the Civ games, the Second Life, the Mindcraft worlds and the shoot-em-up games on the kids' consoles, they are not an option. At any rate, no matter how much you distract the brain, eventually the stomach will wake you up from your digital diversion.
To sum it up, because you look at the world not from the perspective of humanity today, you are content with fantastic ideas
Pennsylvania used to have rivers that caught fire. Now they are much cleaner...
Exporting pollution isn't a technological "fix". US may be cleaner today, but the most important reason is that polluting production was moved abroad where there are no environmental regulations.
The rivers in China now burn just as bright, it is easier to cut the air in Beijing with a knife on a bad day than to breathe it, and in the wrong season the pollution goes almost as far as California, killing the forests in Northern Japan on the way. Of course, you're not seeing this in the US, so you believe the problem is "fixed". Alas, you're wrong.
Incidentally, this is how you have notebooks for less than $500. Mine is (mostly) made in Japan according to all pesky government environmental standards, and costs upwards of $2000.
Nature can rebound very quickly when given the chance
Wrong on all counts.
First, "Nature can rebound when given the chance" is not a technological fix.
Second, nature can only rebound from a limited damage, not any damage. If you have read the article, you'd know the assumption that we've not yet inflicted the kind of damage nature can't handle is at least highly suspect.
Worse, "Nature can rebound" is the same attitude that caused the burning rivers in Pennsylvania in the first place, that is, shifting the cost of your pollution into someone else's backyard, preferably the backyard of someone who can't get back at you.
There are also limits to how much, and how quick is "very quick". Even if you reforest the 1000 year old forest you cut down for a decade, it will take at least another 1000 years for it to achieve the diversity you've had in the first place. Maybe. So, your reforestation example is also very much short of a technology that can "fix" deforestation at the pace and cost it was caused in the first place.
Overall, plants grow better with more CO2.
Wrong. Plants grow better with more CO2 only compared to the "normal" conditions that we are experiencing now. Once conditions change, the plants may or may not grow, depending on how the effects are distributed. If history is any indication, any major shift in global temperatures has caused extinction events massive enough to be noticed millions of years later.
However, global warming will turn Canada and Siberia into much more diverse biological areas eventually
"Eventually" in this case is likely measured in millenia or more. In the long run there is probably a "fix" for everything, but int he long run we're all dead. The assumption of the OP is that there is always a "fix" that is available when we needed. You have miserably failed to demonstrate such a fix for any significant problem I've mentioned so far.
For example, how can we run out of metals on the Earth? Where do you think metals go after they are used? Why can't we just recycle them?
I assume they go into the finished products, and unless you want to unravel your existing infrastructure, you'd need more. Also, it seems that recycling isn't that easy, as we're still mining instead of recycling. You may claim there is a technology, which is just "expensive", but this is the same as having no viable technology. We know of fusion, but cannot use it for power generation.
you are contributing to a climate of negativism that could become a self-fulfilling prophecy if people start fighting over perceived scarcity rather than create more abundance for all with the same technology
It is exactly the other way around. By praying that "future technological development" will solve anything, you're not addressing the real and significant costs imposed by reckless current consumption. And you're very likely contributing to the undermining of development of future technologies.
Going out for a drive has no appeal anymore?
This is not an example of deploying technology to solve a problem. We just stopped outputting more CFCs, and we are waiting for the nature to take its course, eventually. As of today, the ozone hole is still there, and we're still waiting. You can watch nature's progress here: http://ozonewatch.gsfc.nasa.gov/
The same thing everyone else does, which is referred to by the world "Caucasian" in the census. What is your point agian?
Yes, i could even take almost all of the GDP
What if it costs more than the GDP by then? What if, in addition, GDP declines very, very much because of the factors, described in the article, putting a solution totally out of reach?
Of course, there is the obvious question too -- why wait until a problem requires most of the GDP, instead of using the amazing predictive powers of science, see the problem before it occurs and mitigate it at a much smaller fraction of the GDP?
how far we've come on commercial space flight in only about a decade.
How far exactly? Russia is still dominating commercial space flight and have the cheapest and most capable launch platform. Incidentally, it is over 50 years old. The new developments in the US are mostly NASA-licensed tech cobbled together in a smaller package by staff plucked from NASA. That is, we're still talking Herr Wernher, more or less.
Besides, LEO commercial launches are largely irrelevant to the problems we need to solve, outside of the improved ability to monitor the destruction of the environment or a better GPS, in addition to being probably a serious environmental hazard.
Incidentally, you sidestepped my question. Show me at least one case when a technology was deployed to "fix" a global environmental issue, and "fixed" it successfully. Wait, I'll make it even easier for you, forget "fixing", show me a PROPOSAL to "fix" a global environmental problem, a proposal that is based on existing, commercial technology and has reasonable expectations to succeed.
twitter is not a solution to the problems I describe. IT can optimize the logistics of digging up a resource, but it won't produce more chromium ore once we use up the stock.
Just because a Linux distro might be heavily customized by a subcontractor of Raytheon does not make it, or the networks of Raytheon or the subcontractor, impenetrable to Chinese (or other) hackers.
Well, we can always hope that some Chinese hacker will prove to be a kind soul and release them for everyone's benefit.